“Merlin!” Ari’s voice brightened the courtyard.
“No,” he croaked, but his voice, like his heart, was in tatters. “Don’t…” Merlin breathed hard. He didn’t need Morgana’s touch to unlock any more of his memories. She’d thrown the doors wide. Now he saw a castle in a chilled northern country that no longer existed, Arthur 12 listening as Merlin used visions of the future to help guide him. But it hadn’t worked; he blamed Merlin for his heartbreak over Gweneviere and ran him through with Excalibur. It was the only time one of his Arthurs had tried to kill him.
Then that blistering day in a country far too hot for his robes, when Merlin grew so desperate to leave the cycle that he tossed himself off a cliff—only to wake up with seventeen broken bones and the rest of cycle 20 to finish.
And the moment he’d realized he was truly stuck on repeat. Arthur 6. Merlin had been so existentially seasick that he’d tried to sit that one out. He found the nearest monastery and argued with the monks until they decided he must have a demon for a mother. Arthur hadn’t made it far without Merlin’s help, dying with a thatch of arrows in his gut before he set foot near a throne.
“Merlin!” Ari shouted again as she crossed the courtyard, Excalibur held high.
“Stay away!” Merlin cried in a horribly soft voice. He tried to use magic to write it in the sky, but the sparks left his fingers and fizzled out.
“You’ve failed Arthur so many times,” Morgana said, appearing over him, crouching until she was all he could see. The torn ribbons of her hair, the vicious mercy in her eyes. “Now it’s time for this to end. My way.”
“And what is that?” Merlin rasped.
“King Arthur needs to die,” she said sweetly. “Once and for all.”
Merlin tried to get up one more time but couldn’t. Back to the black-and-white tiles of the courtyard he went. He couldn’t see Ari, but he could hear the persistent pounding of her feet in the otherwise silenced city. “Maybe I’m weak, but Ari is stronger than the others,” he said, conviction pushing the words out. “Your old tricks won’t be enough this time, Morgana.”
“Really?” she asked. “How about a new trick, then?”
Morgana vanished from her place at Merlin’s side right before Ari reached him.
Ari fell to her knees, touching his face. “Merlin, what happened?”
Morgana reappeared with a cold smile, placing one finger against Ari’s temple, and one against Merlin’s. She sent them spinning into darkness and pain—together.
“Where am I?” Ari asked, the words silvery and unattached to anything.
She had no body, no hands, no voice—only a view. She was in a shimmering cave lined in earth that smelled of ancient water. Reflected light formed a shimmering blue net on the walls.
“We are inside my worst memory,” Merlin said, his voice beside her, and yet also far away. “Morgana has truly outdone herself. She wants you to see my deepest shame.”
“I’m angry, bitter. Hungry,” Ari said, confused.
“You aren’t. I am… or I was. Once upon a time.” Merlin’s voice pointed toward two figures in the ethereal cave. One was a woman. Kind of. She was liquid grace and glowing edges, beautiful and terrifying.
“That’s not Morgana,” Ari said. Morgana felt vile. Evil. Although really those were the same words in a different arrangement. Either way, this felt deeper, like old rot or the roots of an ancient mountain, or perhaps the unfathomable darkness of space.
“That is not Morgana,” Merlin agreed. “That is the Lady of the Lake. Nimue. To me, she called herself Nin. I have not seen her since this moment. Perhaps she is dead and gone. It was she who gave Arthur Excalibur.”
“Does that make her good?”
Merlin’s tone was so cold. Defeated. “It makes her a supplier of weapons.”
“What about the other person?” Ari asked, squinting at the weathered, gnarled figure.
“You don’t recognize him?” Merlin said, a splash of hope in his voice. “That is me. At my earliest. At my worst.”
Ari took in the bold stars and moons on the cuffs and trim of his robe, unfaded. Old Merlin was the same height and weight as the Merlin she loved, and yet everything about this one was different. White, furious hair, beard, and eyebrows. A hooked nose and wrinkled lips.
And most of all, an insatiable, cold hunger that seemed to permeate Ari’s heart.
“This interruption of yours is the worst yet, Nin,” Old Merlin said with a dash of entitled impatience. Ari barely recognized the voice, Merlin’s voice. It was so much older, the creases sharp. “I am needed by the king. He is in the midst of battle.”
“If you go to Arthur now, you’ll die,” Nin said, her words flooding the cave and Ari’s senses. “I can’t have that.”
“How can you be so sure I’ll die?” Old Merlin asked. “Is there a prophecy?”
“Prophecies are for amateurs,” Nin said, her watery voice freezing over. “You’re not going anywhere, all apologies.”
Old Merlin pushed up his sleeves, crooked, knobby fingers pointed at the Lady of the Lake. “Arthur needs me!” His voice cracked with desperation, and love, which overtook the anger of this memory. “Free me!”
“How about some more power, Merlin? To make up for your impending loss.” Nin sighed. “You’re not going to take this well. I haven’t been looking forward to it. But I’m not so cruel as to send you spinning through eternity without a few perks.”
The ancient magician’s hands drooped. “What kind of power?”
“The ability to sense the future? To see forward a bit, the rough edges of events, anyway. It might help, given your… condition.”
“Condition?” Ari found herself murmuring.
“My backward aging,” Merlin elaborated from beside her. His presence had fractured as if the memory was breaking him into pieces. “I return to this moment often. So often. I want to crawl back through time and change everything. Stop it. Prevent it. Save Arthur… instead of treating myself.”
“I accept your gift,” Old Merlin grumbled, sounding bored.
Ari watched Nin press a kiss that beamed with light onto Old Merlin’s head. Almost instantly, Old Merlin fell to his knees, sobbing, holding his brittle chest.
“What happened?” Ari asked.
“That was the first time I saw the future,” Merlin said. “The end of that battle I’d just been stolen from.”
“What did you see?” Ari asked, fear shimmering. Merlin didn’t answer, and she wished she could hold his hand, frustrated that they were both simply wisps of consciousness tied to each other inside this trauma. “I’m here, Merlin. Tell me what you saw.”
“I don’t have to,” Merlin finally said.
Old Merlin disappeared as the entire cave faded into a blackness that became night. The moon took forever to glow, and the stars were hidden. All around, Ari smelled death. Now she was relieved that she didn’t have a body as her mind glided over countless corpses, following Old Merlin across the remains of a field washed with blood and death.
Thousands of soldiers, knights, and flags littered the field.
Broken and fallen. Without hope.
Old Merlin moved toward the heart of the misery, where one lone figure sat, clutching a body to their chest. Ari’s shock almost overpowered Old Merlin’s sadness in that moment. Almost. The person holding the fallen body was Morgana. Not the ethereal, bluish Morgana, but a woman of flesh and sorrow. The dead man in her arms was wearing a perfect suit of armor, his golden crown dimly glinting in the grass beside him.
“Merlin, is that…”
“My Arthur. The first.”
Old Merlin’s voice shook as sadness turned to anger. “So Mordred has murdered his own father. Stolen the kingdom of peace for his unrighteous purpose. I will find him and train him to do what is right.” But even as he said the words, his eyes trailed to the body beside Arthur’s—the one speared through by Excalibur.
“That’s Arthur’s son, Mordred,” Merlin whispered to Ari. “They killed each other.”
“Why?” Ari asked, shocked.